New Labour is sinking under the weight of its past

Monday 8 February 2010 10:56 BST

Weary: Alastair Campbell struggles to stay composed on The Andrew Marr Show

When you reach your fifties, says the narrator in Martin Amis's new novel, The Pregnant Widow, "there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past." And that, it occurs to me, is precisely the problem that now besets New Labour. Of course, the adjective "New" — still used with a straight face by Gordon Brown and his colleagues — has long since seemed ridiculous. But there is more to it than that. "New Labour" is now weighed down, like the man in his fifties, by its past. It reeks of yesterday.

Look at Alastair Campbell on The Andrew Marr Show yesterday, as he struggled not to break down in tears. The trigger was Marr's perfectly reasonable question about the Iraq inquiry and whether Tony Blair had misled Parliament over the intelligence on Saddam's WMD. "I've been through a lot on this, Andrew," said Campbell as he fought to retain his composure.

At that moment, he looked like a man bearing the full burden of decades fighting, as journalist, spin doctor and strategist, to get Labour in office and keep it there; a political pugilist weary to his bones. There was a time when, in his combative, testosterone-charged refusal to accept anything other than total victory for his team, Campbell seemed to personify the future. Yesterday he was evidently almost crushed by the burden of the past. He exuded, so to speak "past-ness".

In the midst of all the rows about the Conservatives' spending plans and their so-called "Jittery January", it has been easy to lose sight of the simplicity of the forthcoming general election. Although David Cameron is assumed to be obsessed by Blair's victory in 1997, a much closer model is Bill Clinton's in 1992. In that election, no less than this one, the scale of the deficit was the central issue. "It's the economy, stupid," was the first part of the Clinton team's so-called "haiku". The second was: "Don't forget healthcare" (compare the Tories' pledge to increase NHS spending). And the third, and most important, mantra was "Change, or more of the same". James Carville, Clinton's chief strategist, used to say that he looked at President Bush Sr and could only think of "yesterday, yesterday, yesterday".

Hack away the foliage of policy argument and Westminster chatter, and the same question lies at the heart of the 2010 election: change, or more of the same. In this respect, the Chilcot inquiry has been of immense help to the Conservatives, not because its hearings have established fresh information, but because it has reminded the public of all the old stuff. The visceral response on seeing Campbell, Blair, Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon et al explaining how it was that they did nothing wrong, honest, sir, has been: what, again?

And — not to put too fine a point on it — so what? Of what possible relevance is all this to the millions of voters who are still suffering because of the recession? It is a bad break for Gordon Brown that he was forced by Nick Clegg to declare that he would testify at the inquiry before the general election. The effect will be to deepen the impression that he, too, is stuck in the past. It is all so 2003.

And it is bad timing for Brown that the Labour MPs charged under the Theft Act over their expenses, Elliot Morley, Jim Devine and David Chaytor, will appear at City of Westminster magistrates court on 11 March. True, an obscure Conservative peer, Lord Hanningfield, will be there, too. But one of Cameron's smartest tactics has been to distance himself swiftly, unequivocally and ruthlessly from all expense fiddling. He perceived that it was not the letter of Parliament's rules that counted, but the public's sense of fairness, and was accordingly much quicker off the mark than Brown to reprimand those on his own side who had self-evidently abused the system. As the PM dithered, Cameron grasped that the unlovely spectacle of MPs with their snouts in the trough was all part of the past and that he, personally, had to align himself with a future of reform and decency.

Winning the argument is not enough in politics. You have to show that you are in harmony with the times, that you are at one with its culture, its mood and its contours. Blair's greatest insight was that modern politics is sequential, not adversarial. There is no longer a pendulum from Left to Right. In post-Cold War politics, one movement follows another, absorbing its lessons and learning from its mistakes. Blair followed Thatcher. Cameron hopes to follow Blair. Brown's greatest failure was his inability to offer the public a coherent post-Blair politics. It is a grim irony for Gordon that, for all the savagery of his feud with Tony and the bitterness of their rivalry, they are seen by the voters as part of the same era, spliced together by history. In his Evening Standard interview earlier this month, Brown revealed that Blair will play a significant role in the campaign. The former PM is indeed a political colossus, conqueror of the Tories in three general elections. But the prospect of the two men reunited, the Tony and Gordon Show back on the road, will surely sharpen the sense that this is a farewell performance, a valedictory lap of the track.

In private, Blair always acknowledged the problem with making novelty your claim to office: namely that it was an inherently transient claim, containing the seeds of its own obsolescence. Now Amis's "enormous and unsuspected presence" has caught up with New Labour. Another generation prepares to take the helm, snatching its years at the top before the day, years hence, when it, too, will crumble under the weight of its past.